130 ALEXANDER HAMILTON 



greatest, instance of "log-rolling" known to American 

 history. The Northern advocates of assumption car- 

 ried their point by yielding to the Southerners in the 

 matter of the capital. Congress assumed over 

 #20,000,000 of state debts, and the city of Washington 

 was built upon the bank of the Potomac. 



This was a great victory for Hamilton, for the Fed- 

 eralist party, and for the United States as a nation. It 

 certainly required a pretty liberal interpretation of the 

 Constitution to justify Congress in assuming these 

 debts, but if it had not been done it is very doubtful if 

 the Union could long have been held together. We 

 must always be grateful to Hamilton for his daring 

 and sagacious policy, yet at the same time we must 

 acknowledge that the opposition was animated by a 

 sound and wholesome feeling. Every day showed 

 more clearly that Hamilton's aim was to insure the 

 stability of the government through a firm alliance 

 with capitalists, and the fear was natural that such a 

 policy, if not held in check, might end in transforming 

 the government into a plutocracy, that is to say, a 

 government in which political power is monopolized 

 by rich men, and employed in furthering their selfish 

 interests without regard to the general welfare of the 

 people. Those who expressed such a fear were more 

 prescient than their Federalist adversaries believed 

 them to be ; for now after the lapse of a hundred years 

 the gravest danger that threatens us is precisely such 

 a plutocracy ! It has been one of our national misfor- 

 tunes that for three-quarters of a century the mere 

 maintenance of the Union seemed to call for theories 

 which when put into operation are very far from mak- 

 ing a government that is in the fullest sense " of the 



